$10 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean (July 2016)

Been a minute since my last$10 Showdown. Since then, Linode
has turned thirteen and doubled the RAM offered on all of their servers for new and existing customers. This means that Linode is offering twice the RAM as DigitalOcean
at the ten dollar price point! Here’s the plan overview:

Linode

DigitalOcean

Memory

2 GB

1 GB

Processor

1 Core

1 Core

Storage

24 GB SSD

30 GB SSD

Transfer

2 TB

2 TB

Overage

$0.02 / GB

$0.02 / GB

Network In

40 Gbps

1 Gbps

Network Out

125 Mbps

1 Gbps

Price

$10 / month

$10 / month

$0.015 / hour

$0.015 / hour

Linode may be offering double the RAM but they are still lighter than DigitalOcean for storage and network out.

Since my last post, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has been released so that’s what I used for the comparison. I went with the default data centers for both as they don’t share a city domestically. Linode was Newark, NJ and DigitalOcean was New York 3.

In the past I’ve documented getting the server up to date and all of that but will be omitting it this go around as I don’t feel it adds much value. Both servers were brought up to date and I installed the necessary packages to be able to run the following tests.

CPU

sysbench --test=cpu run

Linode

DigitalOcean

Number of Events

10,000

10,000

Execution Time

12.6811s

14.8737s

Minimum Request

1.24ms

1.37ms

Average Request

1.27ms

1.49ms

Maximum Request

3.78ms

13.54ms

Linode’s CPU out performed DigitalOcean’s. In comparison to the last comparison, DigitalOcean’s total execution time seems to have dropped by a few seconds and the maximum request for both companies went up. Linode’s doubled while DigitalOcean’s went up nearly 350%.

Memory (read)

sysbench --test=memory run

Linode

DigitalOcean

Number of Events

104,857,600

104,857,600

Execution Time

47.7652s

96.0324s

Minimum Request

0.00ms

0.00ms

Average Request

0.00ms

0.00ms

Maximum Request

9.72ms

8.76ms

MB / sec

2,143.82 MB / sec

1,066.31 MB / sec

Reading from memory was twice as slow on DigitalOcean as it was on Linode. That being said, Linode’s maximum request time was slower and both companies had maximum request times that were significantly larger than my last benchmarks.

Memory (write)

sysbench --test=memory --memory-oper=write run

Linode

DigitalOcean

Number of Events

104,857,600

104,857,600

Execution Time

47.0562s

74.9946s

Minimum Request

0.00ms

0.00ms

Average Request

0.00ms

0.00ms

Maximum Request

9.33ms

4.05ms

MB / sec

2,176.12 MB / sec

1,084.67 MB / sec

Writing to memory was fairly consistent with the speeds seen while reading. Linode’s time to execute was lower but DigitalOcean had lower maximum request times.

Compared to the last benchmarks, both companies read/writes per second were worse, Linode significantly so. Regardless, Linode still outperformed DigitalOcean.

Network

Something I haven’t tested in the past and I think is pretty important considering DigitalOcean is offering 1 Gbps both up and down is network performance. To benchmark the network I ran ran [speedtest-cli][speedtest]
:

Linode

DigitalOcean

Download

1485.73 Mbit / sec

844.65 Mbit / sec

Upload

285.61 Mbit / sec

441.93 Mbit / sec

YMMV with this one as different servers were used by speedtest. That being said, DigitalOcean’s upload speeds were faster than Linode’s. The stats as a whole seem fairly consistent with the advertised speeds from both companies.

Conclusion

For the most part, it seems like Linode outperforms DigitalOcean in most categories. As with my previous comparisons, I’m just presenting the data and you will need to figure out which provider makes the most sense for you. If you need MOAR RAM, Linode’s probably the right pick. Faster network, perhaps you should go with DigitalOcean.

Regardless of what you pick, I’d definitely appreciate it if you used my referral links for Linode
and DigitalOcean
. If you sign up for Linode, don’t forget to use coupon code LINODE10 to get ten bucks in credit. DigitalOcean will hook you up with ten bucks too, but you don’t need a coupon code.